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Abstract

In The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis, Amitav Ghosh traces the journey of spices from the Spice Islands, or the Moluccas in Indonesia to Europe. Nestled between Celebes and New Guinea, these islands with their rich volcanic soil, emerged as the epicentre of global spice production, offering the world mace, nutmeg, cloves, and pepper in the 16th century. The nutmeg’s two hemispheres hold hidden meaning in today’s world: one shell portraying its commercial merits as a spice and the other elusive crust remaining open to interpretation. The inconspicuous nutmeg, a coveted spice during the ‘Spice Race’, was also a ‘spice of curse’ that sparked ‘spice wars’ and the ‘spice trade’. The West’s fascination for the East is evident in the Orientalist quest for spices resulted in the ensuing discovery of opium, rubber, and teak, thus resulting in monarchs of that time engaging in the ‘Spice Race’, one that is akin to our present-day ‘Space Race’ of the rich and the powerful. In colonial times, the flowering poppy, the mighty teak, and the little nutmeg assumed the status of powerful spices as they had erased dynasties, attracted invasions, created fortunes, and brought a new way of life into being. This paper shall refer to the spice wars, the rise of global capitalism, geopolitical conflicts around food and what these spices represent today in postcolonial times. We shall see how Ghosh’s postcolonial textual response in his fiction and non-fiction is typical of postcolonial material ecocriticism where the margins write back and lay bare materialistic colonial intent of the past by retelling the tale of the spice trade and recording the archive of the unfair colonial trade of spices. This paper shall thus consider the postcolonial geopolitics of food and consider the contemporary dynamics and economics of demand and supply.

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